Saturday, January 18, 2014

Google to Produce Bloodless Glucose Meter, but is it Reasonable?

My opinion: Though I think this idea is cool and exciting, I'm not sure it will actually be that popular. Let's think about the kind of people who have diabetes. They are very often the elderly. Unfortunately, I don't believe very many old people wear contacts, making it difficult for this product to reach them. Maybe it would be better if people could somehow take a tear or extract drop of liquid from their eyes and put it into a machine. What's more, I can see this type of technology being replaced by something more efficient. If we are supposed to have tiny robots traveling through are bodies to destroy cancer in the next couple decades, these machines will probably also detect blood glucose levels. What's your opinion? Feel free to comment.

Not everyone is so convinced when it
comes to the contact lenses Google X just announced it’s developing for
people with diabetes. Mixed in with a lot of excitement around the cool
technology behind the lenses is some reservation that it’s just too early to
tell whether Google is any more likely than others to succeed.

For a blog post yesterday, she talked to Brian Otis,
the project’s co-founder, who said the team realized that accuracy is the
biggest challenge. The good news is, Google isn’t trying to do all of the
science and commercialization by itself. The project founders said in a blog post they’re in discussions with
the FDA and are planning to look for partners.

The vision is to embed a wireless
chip and a miniaturized glucose sensor between two layers of soft contact lens
material with a pinhole that would let tears seep into the sensor. It would
take a reading every second and transmit it to a mobile device or a separate
device specifically tied to the lenses.